Thursday, March 26, 2015

Recently, my friend Devin Rose, who works for Fr. Joseph
Barron’s WordOnFire.org and runs St. Joseph’s
Vanguard, posted this lengthy comment on his Facebook page (edited for
format):

Have you ever had an idea, one that is strong and
meaningful but tough to articulate, and then you stumble upon a quote that
brings it into sudden focus? Such a quote flashes like lightning around the
idea, illuminating it and allowing you to see it clearly for the first time.
I had the experience tonight after discovering a
remark by Austin Farrer, an Oxford scholar and close friend of C.S. Lewis:

For though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys
belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the
ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create
belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish. [in
Jocelyn Gibb, ed., Light on C. S. Lewis
(1966)]

I’ve spent hundreds of hours over the last couple
years exchanging arguments with all sorts of unbelieving friends — atheists,
agnostics, and other labels I didn’t know existed. Some fellow Catholics have
warned me that, “Nobody has ever been argued into the Church,” or that,
“Evangelization is more about the way you live than the arguments you give.”
Neither sentiment ever rang true with me, at least not completely, but I
couldn’t explain why.
Then I discovered Dr. Farrer’s quote, which
affirmed two key convictions that have brewed within me during these many
encounters. First, without arguments or good reasons to believe in God, most
Christians will abandon their faith — especially while they are young.
Religious experience and devotion can only carry people so far. Most of the
atheists and agnostics I engage were raised in Christian homes, but ones that
provided no intellectual support.
Second, Christianity is not even a viable option
for most non-believers if, to them, it lacks respectable arguments. It’s not
that they won’t find the Gospel compelling without good, supporting reasons; it’s
that they won’t even consider it. Without a strong intellectual basis, they’ll
pay Christianity as much attention as Scientology or Hinduism.

Microsoft Office: Besides my personal use, they're the office apps I encounter most frequently when I do work. Since I'm not a hard-core user, I don't do a lot of shopping around or experimenting unless I'm forced to (as I have been recently with browsers). I'm almost expert level with MS Word; MS Excel gives me pretty much all my spreadsheet and database needs; and MS Outlook does alright as an organizer/email tool. I picked up OpenOffice some time ago, but haven't gotten around to playing with it.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Tim Worstall’s recent Forbes.com piece, “Paul Krugman’s Amazing About Face On The Minimum Wage”, reminds me very much of the old joke that either came from or found its way into the musical Chicago: The woman who comes home to
find her husband in bed with another woman. In the middle of protesting his innocence, the cad asks his angry spouse, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Worstall’s piece is all about the differences between “good Krugman”, who in September 1998 published an article derisively dismissing minimum-wage arguments (because “the amorality of the market economy is part of its essence, and cannot be legislated away”), and “bad Krugman”, whose March 2 NYT op-ed “Walmart’s Visible Hand” made a devastating concession: “… [E]xtreme inequality and the falling fortunes of America’s workers are a choice, not a destiny imposed by the gods of the market. And we can change that choice if we want to.”

Old Krugman said that Walmart paying higher wages might lead to less turnover, better morale and higher productivity. But only at Walmart because the operative part was “higher wages than other employers”. And
that’s the one thing that a general rise in wages, for example a rise in the minimum wage, cannot accomplish.
New Krugman tells us that a rise in the minimum wage will accomplish exactly that thing that Old Krugman tells us is impossible.

What might be the difference between Old Krugman and New Krugman? Seventeen years of observation? The intervention of a recession which exposed underlying fallacies in free-market thinking? Oh, no: according to Worstall, the difference is a paycheck from that “hotbed of liberal ideology,” the New York Times.

And that, my friends, is pretty much the full substance of Worstall’s refutation of Krugman: He writes for “Hell’s Bible”.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

The first reading recalls the fall of the kingdom of Judah, the southern half of the Davidic Kingdom of Israel, in 586 BC. The northern half, which had retained the name of Israel, had fallen to Sargon II in 722 BC, and had been redesignated an Assyrian province with the name Samaria. Now, with the twin invasions of the Chaldeans and Idumeans, the original Kingdom of David and Solomon was no more.

Moses had given the Hebrew people God and His Law. Nebuchadnezzar gave them their identity as Jews. The seventy years of the Babylonian Exile[*] had done more to make the Jewish people monotheists than had over four centuries of self-rule. The Hebrews had had an alphabet and a written language since at least David’s time; now they began to gather such records as they had and compile their oral traditions, to redact the beginning of what would eventually become the Tanakh — the Hebrew Bible.

This period, in which Jewish identity was being
crystallized, also gave us Psalm 137 [136], a song of heartbreak and loss: “How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?” Not included in the reading of the psalm is the anger:

Remember, Lord, against Edom that day at Jerusalem.They said:
“Level it, level it down to its foundations!”Desolate
Daughter Babylon, you shall be destroyed, blessed the one who pays you back what you have done us!Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock.

Thus was forged in the minds and hearts of the Jewish people the iron triad of God, the Law, and Zion, to which they have clung with stubborn fidelity for over 2,500 years.

Friday, March 13, 2015

When an unapologetically über-conservative man and a
hard-core leftist woman agree on a point, you can almost bet your life savings
the truth is in the opposite direction. Especially when the topic is “offense
discourse”.

Steven Crowder’s
argument is about machismo more than anything else. “Both men and women respect men who take ownership, men who take action. Choosing to ‘be offended’ is the
epitome of inaction. Today’s ‘offended’ men are seen as wimpy
simply because they are. Instead of harnessing whatever affront is facing them,
instead of facing it head-on, dealing with the problem and coming out the other
side a stronger man, the ‘modern’ male chooses to sulk, to whine, and
inevitably call Gloria Steinem.” Plus, “chicks dig it” when you take action.

It has to be one of the most significant rhetorical own-goals of the Left since the 1960s: allowing the word ‘offend’ to become the go-to way of describing the harms of prejudice. “This content offends me,” “your words are offensive,” “his conduct gave offence to x,” etc. What this has always facilitated is the commonplace reactionary response to such moral injunctions, defending some imagined noble right to give offense lardered [sic] with smug Stephen Fry image macros. Cue “free speech”’ arguments ad nauseam that resolve into garrulous nothingness. … It is the deeds that flow from words which concern us, and which cannot be contained by the concept of offensiveness.

Of the two arguments, Cross’ is the more fully developed. Crowder’s post amounts to little more than a couple of chest-thumps and an admonition to “put on your big-boy britches and deal with it”. Both arguments, however, are simply wrong, or at least not fully to the point.

In today’s Gospel reading, Mark gives us an account of
Jesus’ transfiguration in the presence of Ss. Peter, John and James. A lot is
packed into this theophanic moment: Moses, the Teacher and Lawgiver, sitting
with Elijah, the greatest of the Prophets, both in conversation with the Word
of God Revealed — not quite in his fullness of power and glory, but in a manner
(somewhat) comprehensible to the three disciples. Moreover, they are conversing: neither Moses nor Elijah is
a mindless shade, as many Mediterranean cultures conceived of the dead:

Who will sing praises to the Most High in Hades,

as do those who are alive and give thanks?

From the dead, as from one who does not exist,
thanksgiving has ceased;

So wondrous is this revelation that Peter, speaking from his
heart, offers to build sukkoth for
them. Sukkoth, on the one hand, were
temporary shelters, walled with leather and roofed with palm fronds, such as
field workers and religious pilgrims used; on the other hand, just such a
tabernacle had been the temple of the Hebrews as they sojourned in the desert
with Moses — a holy place that was wholly portable. God had “tented” with His
people in the desert, in the Ark of the Covenant, just as His Word
“tabernacled” among humanity in the flesh of Christ (cf. John 1:14 LXX, eskēnōsen).

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